Wired Media

Paul Boag made an interesting argument when speaking about ‘the battlefield of design: designers vs clients’ at this years Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference. The key points covered were much alike those of which I’ve learnt throughout my studies at the University of the West of England (UWE) prior to my placement at Wired Media.

The focus of the discussion was that us designers and developers have a terrible habit of hiding away what we’re doing until ready to present a final product to the client; which invariably doesn’t suit their needs, a much more successful and proven approach being that of a user-centric design process, getting the client and their users involved in the development of websites and applications. By getting involved with the client and their business/organisation we provide ourselves with a means of better understanding the aims and objectives of the client and what they want to achieve from working with us.

But is that enough we ask? whilst understand the needs of a client and having them involved in the various stages of a design process is paramount; equally important is understand the needs of the users; the people who are going to be using the website or application. Usability studies have been proven to have a large impact on the success of a design process, by testing designs on a selection of real prospective users it allows for us to see where there are flaws in applications and test various solutions of them.

Paul also mentioned how he is frequently having issues with clients reducing designers to mere ‘pixel pushers’. The solution? to focus on problems, not solutions, rather than telling the designer you want a text colour changed or something moved, tell them what you want to achieve; be that giving the design more room to breathe or simply to increase attention to specific areas of a web page, they may have a better way to do it; and by telling the designer the solution rather than the problem it’s suppressing and wasting their creative capabilities.

If you are looking for web design in bristol visit our website – www.wiredmedia.co.uk

An interesting quote from Elliot Jay Stocks at the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference in Bristol this year. Constantly as designers we’re faced with an array of compatibility based concerns that cause us to reduce the design quality or usability of an application purely for the increased accessibility derived from it. But why should we do this when considering the little things? yes, whilst legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) are still kicking about holding an undeservedly high percentage of the market we will still have to cater for them when building commercial applications. But when thinking of little extras we can add to make designs that little bit nicer for modern browser users; why should we hold back?

CSS3 is a big topic at the moment with many designers liking what they see, but concluding that as long as IE6 and the like are supported by the manufacturers, it’s somewhat redundant for usage in commercial environments purely because only a small percentage of users ever being able to see the features. Elliot’s point of view however is to ask why this should this stop us? Little extras like text-shadow are so easy to add with a mere single line of CSS and act as a nice touch for the few that can see them; with no negative implications for legacy browser users.

Another example could be when selecting the last element in an element array, such as the last list item of an unordered list; legacy methods would involve perhaps writing a ‘last’ class into that element with the server-side language in use; but why bother when the new selectors can allow you to select this in such a more semantic and simple way? Yes this would mean legacy browser users wouldn’t see the difference; but what would that mean? an extra undesired border on the final element? probably, but does it make the system unusable? no; but it does speed up the web design process and mean we don’t have to throw unnecessary logic into the view of our MVC systems.

If you are looking for web design in bristol visit our website – www.wiredmedia.co.uk